Many B2B sales organizations in recent years have been using content marketing to generate leads and find new sales prospects. By publishing original content such as blog articles, white papers, and more, B2B companies can build an audience and create their own platform of “owned media” that has powerful potential to keep customers coming back. But as more and more companies have started to publish their own content, the Internet is becoming a bit crowded and cluttered. It’s more competitive than ever before to make sure that your content actually gets through to the right audiences. This is where a new strategy in content marketing can help give your company an edge – it’s called “content amplification.”

With content amplification, your company can build upon the strengths of your content marketing program by using some additional strategies and tools. Content amplification can also be thought of as “content advertising” – instead of buying ads to put your message in front of an audience, you pay to “amplify” and extend the reach of your content by putting your content in front of a wider audience than it could reach on its own.

Many companies might feel reluctant to get involved with content amplification. After all, you’re already investing time and money in creating content! And now people are telling you that you need to spend more money to advertise that content? It might sound frustrating, but this is the new reality of content marketing, especially as social media platforms like Facebook are becoming more cluttered with content and reducing the organic reach or percentage of posts that get seen by each brand’s own page. Even if you have great content, it’s no guarantee that enough people will see it or act upon it. Sometimes you need to “pay to play,” and content amplification lets you do that.

However, content amplification is not just a cost – there are also some additional benefits and opportunities that have come about from content amplification. Here are a few of the best content amplification tools that your company needs to consider:

Social Media Ads and Sponsored Posts

Social media platforms like LinkedIn offer more sophisticated social media ads and sponsored posts than ever before – but instead of sponsoring a post as an advertisement, you can use sponsored posts to drive more traffic to a piece of content. Content amplification can be as simple as paying to put your social media posts in front of a wider audience.

Use Recommendation Engines

What if you could put a link to your content right at the end of another similar article on a widely read site? Tools like Outbrain give you the ability to pay to have your content recommended (and linked) from a similar article on major websites. This way, you can get a wider audience for your content that is based on relevance and similar interests – this lets you piggyback off of another site’s audience and is highly targeted based on what people are already reading.

Inspire Action

Content marketing is not just about informing, educating, and building an audience – it ultimately needs to be connected to sales results. This is where another content amplification tool called Sniply can help. Sniply is a unique tool that lets you create a customized call to action on every link that your company shares on social media. It can be used to share links to your own content or when sharing links to other publishers’ content – but the call to action is totally yours to customize. Sniply makes it easier to generate conversions from every piece of content, whether it’s generating sales leads or inviting people to sign up for an email list or download a white paper or more.

Your content is facing more of an uphill battle to get seen and get shared. Of course, it still matters to create great content, but even the best content often needs an extra boost to get the audience it deserves. This is why content amplification matters: it helps you create a targeted audience to put your content in front of the right people and generate conversions to improve your sales results.

Gregg Schwartz is the vice president of sales and marketing at Strategic Sales & Marketing, a lead-generation firm based in Connecticut. His company helps technology companies and various startups and small-to-mid-size businesses in the business-to-business sales category generate sales leads and improve their sales processes.

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